Dale Blasingame, an assistant professor of practice in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to discuss the era of deep fakes.

Deep fakes refer to the use of artificial intelligence applications to create convincing, lifelike audio and video reproductions of individuals, often celebrities. Crucially, the deep fakes can behave in ways without the approval or consent of the individual being faked and can be misused for fake product endorsements, political gain or even pornography. The technology behind deep fakes is advancing so rapidly that even experts are finding it increasing difficult to tell the difference between fakes and reality.

Blasingame received the 2017 Presidential Excellence Award for Teaching and the 2023 Presidential Excellence Award for Service at TXST. He is a part of the Digital Media Innovation faculty, and he teaches courses that introduce students to different aspects of how technology is changing journalism, media and marketing. Before joining TXST, Blasingame was a television news producer. He spent nine years at WOAI-TV in San Antonio, where he won two Lone Star Emmy awards and was nominated for a third. Before that, he was a news anchor and sports reporter for KTSA-AM in San Antonio. Blasingame is a member of the Online News Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

FURTHER READING:

What to know about the rise of AI deepfakes
California Bans Political ‘Deepfakes’ during Election Season
AI is fuelling a deepfake porn crisis in South Korea. What’s behind it – and how can it be fixed?

Texas State University’s Joe Aebersold, team leader for Advanced Imaging and Visualization of Astromaterials (AIVA) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to discuss his work imaging samples of the asteroid Bennu returned to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx mission.

After the mission team recovered the sample return cannister from its landing site in the Utah desert, Aebersold acquired the imagery in his role as a grant specialist with TXST’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs’ (ORSP) Johnson Space Center Engineering & Technical Support (JETS) program. He and his colleague Erika Blumenfeld are charged with documenting the samples with high-resolution photography and 3D models before the materials—which range in size from large pebbles to dust—are distributed to eager researchers.

Aebersold graduated from TXST in 2016 with a geographic information science degree. His journey to NASA began with a 2015 internship working on NASA’s astronaut photography cataloging program through ORSP-JETS. That internship led to another in the summer of 2016 to work with Jacobs Engineering’s Image Science Analysis Group. There he learned to operate a structured light scanner to make 3D models. In 2017 Jacobs hired him to a full-time position, paving the way to his current role with NASA.

FURTHER READING:

TXST alum shares views of rare NASA asteroid samples with the world

OSIRIS-REx images

Astromaterials 3-D

General NASA image database

Texas State University’s Jenna Walker , director of Watershed Services with The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to discuss the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and predict the water quality along Texas’ 367 miles of coastline.

A 2022 study found that 55 out of 61 beaches tested along the Texas Gulf coast exceeded safe levels of fecal bacteria on at least one testing day. Enter The Meadows Center. Using its existing network of citizen scientists in the volunteer Texas Stream Team program, the center is regularly collecting water samples from locations along the coast and using innovative AI technology to analyze the data and predict bacteria levels and trends. Ultimately this is expected to make real-time information available to the public.

Walker oversees several multi-year, grant-funded research initiatives, including the Texas General Land Office-sponsored Clean Coast Texas initiative, a Texas Hill Country groundwater/surface water interaction research series, the Cypress Creek Watershed Protection Plan, and the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality-sponsored Texas Stream Team – an award-winning, statewide community science program designed to educate and empower the public to support watershed protection efforts and foster community-based partnerships.

FURTHER READING:

Texas Stream Team

How dirty are Texas beaches? Researchers are using AI to better track bacterial levels.

The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment